Traces of emergence: an ontological unification of perception, artefact, and process

Objects are part of a complex matrix that contain emergent experiences and meanings. Ernesto Rogers once claimed that if a spoon was examined carefully enough, one could establish how the maker would design a city. While this observation from the great Italian architect may be an over-generalisation, it draws upon an important point – the objects that humans create are reflections of ourselves, our beliefs, our feelings, motivations, and drives. In short, our whole material and emotional culture. The study of design revolves around the dynamics between form, the processes of making and the diverse experiences of object interaction and use – ontologies of artefact emergence that articulate with the complex patterning structures and practices that produce all of material culture. There are two dominant narratives we must consider when examining design as a practice of making. One, as a narrative of form evolution derived principally from a hylomorphic designer-agent ontology1 and the other, as a narrative of making and manufacturing understood through ontologies of matter manipulation. The relationship between the two narratives, this work will argue, presents deep and poorly understood problems with respect to the current taxonomies and ontologies describing advanced manufacturing, limiting the conceptual evolution of design thinking and processes of making and manufacturing. Moreover, this work will argue that pattern and patterning motions is a key meta-concept for understanding design practice that has until this point, received a limited amount of attention. While there are emerging paradigms of research including Industry 4.0 and ‘new materialism’, these have not comprehensively addressed the core disconnect between understanding process and understanding perception. The new materialism mostly explores the making processes of ‘craft’ - which have an important relation to and are indeed antecedents of advanced industrial processes – that do not include the conceptual innovations of advanced process control, CAM for instance. Industry 4.0, while offering interesting insights and innovations in terms of process control does not tend to examine the assumptions that go into forming its conceptual landscape – process ‘optimization’ or defect minimization are for instance seen as by definition, good.Objects are part of a complex matrix that contain emergent experiences and meanings. Ernesto Rogers once claimed that if a spoon was examined carefully enough, one could establish how the maker would design a city. While this observation from the great Italian architect may be an over-generalisation, it draws upon an important point – the objects that humans create are reflections of ourselves, our beliefs, our feelings, motivations, and drives. In short, our whole material and emotional culture. The study of design revolves around the dynamics between form, the processes of making and the diverse experiences of object interaction and use – ontologies of artefact emergence that articulate with the complex patterning structures and practices that produce all of material culture. There are two dominant narratives we must consider when examining design as a practice of making. One, as a narrative of form evolution derived principally from a hylomorphic designer-agent ontology1 and the other, as a narrative of making and manufacturing understood through ontologies of matter manipulation. The relationship between the two narratives, this work will argue, presents deep and poorly understood problems with respect to the current taxonomies and ontologies describing advanced manufacturing, limiting the conceptual evolution of design thinking and processes of making and manufacturing. Moreover, this work will argue that pattern and patterning motions is a key meta-concept for understanding design practice that has until this point, received a limited amount of attention. While there are emerging paradigms of research including Industry 4.0 and ‘new materialism’, these have not comprehensively addressed the core disconnect between understanding process and understanding perception. The new materialism mostly explores the making processes of ‘craft’ - which have an important relation to and are indeed antecedents of advanced industrial processes – that do not include the conceptual innovations of advanced process control, CAM for instance. Industry 4.0, while offering interesting insights and innovations in terms of process control does not tend to examine the assumptions that go into forming its conceptual landscape – process ‘optimization’ or defect minimization are for instance seen as by definition, good

Somatic senses required for the emotional design of upper limb prosthesis

Despite the technological advances associated with prostheses, the total embodiment is still the great challenge in the segment of assistive technology. One of the main aspects is that the bionic member’s sensibility is not responsive to the environment that surrounds it. The purpose of this study aims to identify the perceptual modalities of the somatic senses that are required for a more sensible prosthesis. The methodological strategy contemplates literary research and proposes an interrelationship between neuroscience with philosophical/cultural studies, which regards the different concepts of sensory experience. Such data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The main conclusion points out that it would be important to unite the nine physiological requirements identified in the state of the art, with the ontological image construction of the prosthesis, in order to create a sensory experience that, in addition to the perceptive organs, builds up by the visual areas of the brain.This work is financed by Project “Deus ex Machina”, NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000026, funded by CCDRN, through Sistema de Apoio à Investigação Científica e Tecnológica (Projetos Estruturados I&D&I) of Programa Operacional Regional do Norte, from Portugal 2020 and byProject UID/CTM/00264/2019 of 2C2T –Centro de Ciência e Tecnologia Têxtil, funded by National Founds through FCT/MCTES

Site Interiography and Geophysical Scanning: Interpreting the Texture and Form of Archaeological Deposits with Ground-Penetrating Radar

The remarkable potential of geophysical scanning—to assess the internal variability of sites in new ways, to highlight important phenomena in the field, to exercise co-creation of interpretation and commitment to minimal destruction of community partners’ resources, and to aid in the practice of due diligence in avoiding desecration of the sacred—continues to be underutilized in archaeology. While archaeological artifacts, features, and strata remain primary foci of archaeological geophysics, these phenomena are perceived quite differently in scans than in visual or tactile exposures. In turn, new registers of site exploration afforded by geophysical prospection may be constrained by the language of site excavation and visual observation, requiring adjustments in the ways of thinking about and describing what the instruments are measuring. The texture and form of site deposits as rendered in ground-penetrating radar scans can be examined in detail prior to making interpretations of cultural features or stratigraphy. Far more than simple “anomalies” demanding our attention for excavation, patterns in geophysical data can be the focus of extensive archaeological analysis prior to, in conjunction with, or independent from excavation

The Internet of Musical Things Ontology

The Internet of Musical Things (IoMusT) is an emerging research area consisting of the extension of the Internet of Things paradigm to the music domain. Interoperability represents a central issue within this domain, where heterogeneous objects dedicated to the production and/or reception of musical content (Musical Things) are envisioned to communicate between each other. This paper proposes an ontology for the representation of the knowledge related to IoMusT ecosystems to facilitate interoperability between Musical Things. There was no previous comprehensive data model for the IoMusT domain, however the new ontology relates to existing ontologies, including the SOSA Ontology for the representation of sensors and actuators and the Music Ontology focusing on the production and consumption of music. This paper documents the design of the ontology and its evaluation with respect to specific requirements gathered from an extensive literature review, which was based on scenarios involving IoMusT stakeholders, such as performers and audience members. The IoMusT Ontology can be accessed at: https://w3id.org/iomust#

Cycling as Reading a Cityscape: A Phenomenological Approach to Interface-Shaped Perception

This essay attempts to assess whether the perceptual issues posed by the contemporary interface culture, and the constant attitude shift demanded by the new media between the “natural” and the “as if” modes, might be considered a significant challenge for phenomenological aesthetics as understood in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. To demonstrate how the use of a particular interface profoundly shapes the form and structure of an activity as well as enabling perception of a particular kind, the author does not focus directly on the state-of-the-art smart interfaces, but describes the experience of cycling in a large city, with the interface in the form of the bicycle upgraded with an imagined ride simulator. While the former enables a very particular entrance into the world of perception, shaped by its moderate speed and detachment from the ground, the latter enables techno-shaped perception in the “as if” screenic mode. The experience described raises questions concerning the kinaesthetic, proprioceptive and motor features contributing to the cyclist’s mobile perception, as well as pointing to issues related to the reading of the city’s network as a particular spatial configuration generated by the cyclist’s realtime activity. This is the space-time-event-ridescape maintained and modified by the corporeal act of cycling. The spatiality of such a ride does not presume the notion of a space that contains the cyclist, but builds on notions of being-in-the-ridescape (as a kind of cityscape), in terms not only of full corporeal and mental engagement, but also of bodily literacy. The reading of the cityscape enabled by the combination of two interfaces, the bicycle and the ride simulator, is discussed in relation to de Certeau’s account of pedestrian (walking) experience in a big city, his distinction between strategies and tactics, and the notion that each cyclist contributes a novel story to ridetext, which is viewed not as an aesthetic object but as the production of puzzles for the rider to solve. The paper cocludes by questioning the capacity of phenomenology to accommodate the contemporary phenomenon of a “mixed” or “augmented reality” either in concept or in relation to the demands of the phenomenological reduction and the ends of the epoché. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 10, Edition 2, October 2010: 61-7

SEMA4A: An ontology for emergency notification systems accessibility

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Expert Systems with Applications. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. Reaching this goal is challenging due to users’ diversity: people with disabilities, elderly and children, and other vulnerable groups. Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a typhoon approaching) so the ability to transmit notifications to different kind of users is a crucial feature for such systems. In this work an ontology was developed by investigating different sources: accessibility guidelines, emergency response systems, communication devices and technologies, taking into account the different abilities of people to react to different alarms (e.g. mobile phone vibration as an alarm for deafblind people). We think that the proposed ontology addresses the information needs for sharing and integrating emergency notification messages over distinct emergency response information systems providing accessibility under different conditions and for different kind of users.Ministerio de Educación y Cienci

Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM

We present and evaluate SumUM, a text summarization system that takes a raw technical text as input and produces an indicative informative summary. The indicative part of the summary identifies the topics of the document, and the informative part elaborates on some of these topics according to the reader's interest. SumUM motivates the topics, describes entities, and defines concepts. It is a first step for exploring the issue of dynamic summarization. This is accomplished through a process of shallow syntactic and semantic analysis, concept identification, and text regeneration. Our method was developed through the study of a corpus of abstracts written by professional abstractors. Relying on human judgment, we have evaluated indicativeness, informativeness, and text acceptability of the automatic summaries. The results thus far indicate good performance when compared with other summarization technologies

Reconstructing the Present Through Kinesthetic History: An Investigation into Modes of Preserving, Transmitting, and Restaging Contemporary Dance

Methods of dance preservation have evolved alongside conceptual themes that have framed dance’s historical narrative. The tradition of written dance notation developed in accordance with notions that prioritized logocentricity, and placed historical legitimacy on tangible artifacts and irrefutable archives; whereas the technical revolution of the late twentieth century saw dance preservation practices shift to embrace film and video documentation because they provided more accessible, and more convenient records. Since the 1970s video recordings have generally been considered to provide authentic visual representations of dance works, and the tradition of score writing has begun to wane. However, scholarly criticism has unveiled both philosophical and practical challenges posed by these two modes of documentation, thus illuminating a gap between theories of embodiment and the practice of dance preservation. In alignment with contemporary discourse, which legitimizes the body as a site of generating and storing knowledge, this dissertation suggests ‘kinesthetic history’ as a valid mode of dance preservation. Operating as a counterpart to oral history, and borrowing theoretical concepts from contemporary historiography, existential phenomenology and ethnography, the term ‘kinesthetic history’ suggests a mode of corporeal inscription and transmission that relies on the reciprocal interaction of bodies in space. The use of ‘kinesthetic history’ as a methodological approach to the preservation, translation, and reconstruction of movement material reflects the elements of fluidity, plurality and subjectivity that are often characteristic of contemporary choreographic practices. This theory is interrogated through a case study, which explores the ways in which both a written and digitized score, video recordings, and the ‘kinesthetic history’ of an original cast member operated as modes of transmission in a 2013 restaging of William Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000) at The Juilliard School. Conclusions drawn from the case study challenge the traditional notions of reconstruction and restaging and suggest ‘regeneration’ as an alternative term to describe the process of preserving and transmitting contemporary dance works